Category Archives: Christmas

This is the most eagerly anticipated and read post every year! The wonderful Helen Smith from Eckington School in Derbyshire produces a guide to Christmas TV every year, linking films to books. A great opportunity to promote reading! Helen provides this for free every year, and she allows free distribution. However, please ensure that you acknowledge her as the author of this guide. Also, Helen asks that if you enjoy this guide you consider donating to the page she has set up for the National Literacy Trust.

Librarian Jackie Brown from Thetford Academy is all set to get ahead of the queues by ensuring that her Christmas quiz is all ready and waiting. And she has been generous enough to share it with us so we can be ready too.

Sarah Masters of Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough produces this every year for the Library, and she has shared it with us in it’s original form so that you can download and replace any books which you don’t have in your own library. Please remember to credit her for this. Enjoy!

This great advent calendar was created by Sarah Masters from the Thomas Deacon Academy. She is using it to send to tutors to advertise books in the library. As you click each star for each day, a different page opens with a book and a link to a book trailer. Sarah has been generous in allowing people to adapt the powerpoint to their own needs, therefore this will download in powerpoint and not pdf as usual. You can download it from the Box Files to the right of the posts. Thanks Sarah!

Aren’t these beautiful? Am totally collecting suitable books and learning how to do these for next year! Thank you to Alison Tarrant who learned how to make these at the East Midlands YLG Unconference earlier in the year.

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My Goodreads YA Shelf

I find it hard to rate Francis Hardinge's books. Although they are YA and about young people they seem better read by adults. The writing is wonderful but the plots are dense and convoluted. This one is no different. I really loved the b...

An okay dystopian novel. The premise was good - the death of trees bringing a world without oxygen so people have to love in domes controlled by the elite. That serves as a great environmental warning. But the plot is thin and the charac...

This book held me spellbound from start to finish. It is a ghost story set in the Arctic, but very much in the way of Henry James (The Turn of the Screw). Five young men in 1932 set out to spend a year in a remote part of Iceland making ...

This is the second book in the Railhead series, and one I had been waiting for. Zen and Nova have travelled into the the new gate they made into the unknown. What they find there is not nothing, as the Network Empire had led them to beli...

OrangeBoy is a fantastic book, definitely one for your older YA readers though. Set in and around Brixton, it tells the story of a young black boy called Marlon whose brother had been involved in drugs, but who desperately wants not to f...